To really understand a country you have to go and live there — embed yourself with the people, soak up the culture. If you don’t have the time or inclination for that then the next best thing to is to get stuck in to their commercial cinema. Not the stuff that makes it into major …
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After nearly three and a half years of producing this cinemagoers’ consumer guide, perhaps its time for a statement of intent. A manifesto, if you will. Something to place these musings in perspective as you skim through them over Morning Tea. I try and find something good and interesting in everything I see, and I see […]
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It isn’t online at the Cap Times, so I thought I would archive my interview with The Visitor star, Richard Jenkins here. I spoke with Richard by phone last Sunday morning. *** Best known to New Zealand audiences as the deceased patriarch of the Fisher family in television’s “Six Feet Under”, Richard Jenkins has had […]
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While the Bond 22 juggernaut threatens to crush everything in it’s path, a couple of plucky little indies try and offer a wholesome alternative (and stay out of harm’s way in the process). Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor occupies similar thematic ground to his debut The Station Agent in 2004, but unfurls in altogether less whimsical […]
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer, broadcaster and consultant. He has reviewed cinema for the Capital Times weekly newspaper since September 2006, seeing and reviewing every film commercially released in Wellington in that time (except, for some reason, Flicka or Beverly Hills Chihuahua).
Dan is a regular contributor to Radio New Zealand National’s Nine to Noon programme and produces and co-hosts the weekly movie podcast, Cinematica.
In addition to being the finest swordsman in all France, he is also the meanest hombre west of the Pecos. He tweets here.
Why Funerals & Snakes? In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris; 1963), Fritz Lang said of CinemaScope: “It’s only good for funerals and snakes.”